Are Citizens in Court Impairing Representative Politics? On the Politics of Judicial Rights Protection

The last four decades have witnessed the rise of a human rights-based, judicial-oriented politics that can be christened ‘politics of judicial rights protection’. Legal institutions, rather than the legislature, are called upon to grant effectiveness and visibility to citizens’ rights claims. As such, politics of judicial rights protection is alleged to be detrimental to representative politics. This article makes two claims, one diagnostic and the other normative. Diagnostically, we discuss how the expansion of politics of judicial rights protection has transformed courts into an arena in which people articulate their claims, produce general narratives, and define the political frameworks within which guidelines for legislation are produced. The normative claim is that while there is no democratic deficit resulting from this dynamic, the expanding scope of politics of judicial rights protection calls for greater integration of the legislative and judiciary. Thus, it is imperative that more scholarly attention be paid to this issue to facilitate an effective reform of legislative procedures.